There are plenty of more serious campaigns which Crowdtilt has made possible,
too - including
a campaign to raise donations for Captain Edward Wesley Klein,
a valiant US soldier severely injured by an IED, suffering major injuries -
he has lost both legs, his right arm, two fingers on his left hand, and has a
broken pelvis. The campaign was to help his family with the medical expenses.
Amanda, the organiser of the campaign, set the "tilt" amount at $200 USD. The
campaign raised a staggering $30,142.50 USD.

Crowdtilt now have special arrangements for charitable fundraising, including
options to automatically send tax-deductible receipts to donors.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, Crowdtilt waived their fees for fundraisers
to help with the recovery - the Crowdtilt community collectively raised more
than $180,000 for those affected by the Hurricane.

Crowdtilt have appeared in the media plenty of times. Forbes stated that "The
network is so strong, and the tools themselves are really easy to use and
well-designed".

So, CrowdTilt use Dancer?

Yes - Crowdtilt's system is developed by a team of five developers using Perl
and Dancer.

I asked Will a few quick questions on how Dancer has contributed to Crowdtilt's
success.

What drew you to Dancer originally?

I loved the simplicity and straight-forwardness of Dancer. It's so
dead-simple and just gets out of your way. At a startup, you just want to
pick tools that let you hit the ground running, and Dancer definitely gave
us that.

What benefits has Dancer brought to CrowdTilt?

The Dancer community has always been responsive to us when we've had
questions, or pull requests, or issues. That's really important in any
software project or piece of technology you use. As I mentioned, Dancer
does have a pretty awesome plugin ecosystem, giving us things like
Dancer::Plugin::DBIC, Dancer::Plugin::Stomp, etc. Not having to
reinvent the wheel is always nice.

What would you like to see changed?

As our Dancer apps have grown bigger, we've had some growing pains with
Dancer, but the code base is so simple that it's generally fairly trivial
for us to jump in and figure out what needs to be done. We're really
looking forward to Dancer2 and think that its OO/Moose core will help a
*lot* with some of the stumbling blocks we've run into along the way.

One of the issues we've run into is with the error hooks. They don't
provide an elegant way currently to manipulate all of your error responses
as much as we'd like. We have some internal workarounds in place, and
would like to eventually push some of those changes back into Dancer. I
think these issues should be addressed pretty nicely by Dancer2 as well.

Another thing I'd like to see is Dancer having support for globally unique
id's per request. This is pretty much required in an environment with
multiple servers, and trying to track down specific requests in the logs,
etc. Currently dancer can give you the "hit #" in the log, which is just a
numeric counter, but this resets whenever you restart the app, and will
obviously have duplicate entries for different requests across machines and
different dancer processes. We currently generate our own guid's per
request, but would like to see that functionality moved into Dancer itself.

Overall, I think Dancer2 will address a lot of the growing pains we've
seen, and also that Dancer itself has seen. It's definitely a step in the
right direction for the Dancer community, and the work that's been done
recently to make the transition to Dancer2 as easy as possibly has been
really exciting to watch.

Are there any particular opinions, quotes/soundbites etc expressed by any of your team about Dancer?

Every day I'm a Dancin'.

How many people are responsible for development at Crowdtilt? How many of those work on code using Dancer?

We currently have 5 developers who all touch code using Dancer every day.

How many projects/campaigns have been funded through Crowdtilt to date?

Our founders have asked us not to disclose growth figures or numbers right
now, but we'll have a big announcement about them coming soon! I can say
that we're very happy with our growth and the direction things are headed.
We're having a big impact by enabling lots of people to do and accomplish
things they otherwise wouldn't be able to do.

What is the average campaign fund?

Again, without going into specifics, I can say that we have campaigns ranging
from $20 all the way to $50,000+. Very frequently, a 'small' campaign will
raise orders of magnitude more than they expect. In fact, our campaigns on
average raise 188% of their goal, or 'tilt' amount.

What is the approximate total funds raised through Crowdtilt to date?

Six weeks after our launch back in February our users had raised over $1
million, and we've been very happy with our growth and the amount of users
we've been able to help since then.

Are there any specific campaigns you think ought to be highlighted?

There are so many great campaigns that flow through Crowdtilt, it's hard to
pick out specific gems. Of course the
Halloween Yacht Party
was a fun one, and if you haven't seen our New Years Eve Party campaign that
just tilted on Monday (in a matter of hours, I might add), you can check it out
here:

Those types of campaigns are definitely fun, and a common use case for
Crowdtilters, but we really love to see the campaigns that truly have a
meaningful impact on people's lives. One of the more recent examples that
I love is this one:

Amanda set out to raise a modest $200 to just get any help she could with
medical bills for Captain Klein, and was overwhelmed by the amazing support
she received. She ended up raising over $30,000, well beyond what she ever
could have imagined.

Here's another great one put together by the Reddit community, re-uniting a
Comic Book writer with his collection: